Based on a 1930 Henderson—presumably the 100 mph (160 km/h) Streamline model—and was built in 1936 by a gent called O. Ray Courtney.
Main Street in Sharpsburg, Maryland, September 1862, after the Battle of Antietam
The U.S. Army has long understood the need for soldiers with foreign-language proficiency, and that need only increased as the Army began to be fielded further abroad. In WWII this need was addressed through the creation of the Military Intelligence Service (MIS), a two-branch lingual intelligence-gathering unit composed of a German-speaking section (the famous Ritchie Boys) and a Japanese-speaking section primarily made up of second-generation Japanese-Americans (Nisei).
The Nisei MIS soldiers were embedded with units across the Pacific from all service branches; their ability to decipher Japanese communications and place them in their cultural context made them superb intelligence analysts, interrogators, and battlefield assets. General Douglas MacArthur’s intelligence chief, General Charles Willoughby, claimed that “the Nisei shortened the Pacific War by two years, and saved possibly a million American lives and saved probably billions of dollars.”
One particularly noteworthy group of Nisei MIS soldiers were the 14 linguists assigned to Merrill’s Marauders, a famous guerilla warfare unit which fought far behind enemy lines against overwhelming odds in the inhospitable Burmese jungle.
Assignment to Merrill’s Marauders was particularly dangerous for the Nisei, since they could expect little quarter from the Japanese (who viewed them as race traitors) and even less from local and Chinese guerillas, who passionately hated the Japanese and often mistook American Nisei troops for Imperial Japanese soldiers.
Nisei soldiers’ knowledge of Japanese proved essential to battlefield success on multiple occasions. During engagements, Nisei linguists could interpret shouted Japanese commands in real time, allowing American forces to adjust accordingly and set traps for enemy soldiers. On at least one occasion, a Nisei soldier impersonating an Imperial Japanese officer shouted orders to an entrenched enemy across the line of battle, commanding them to charge directly into American machine gun fire.
Straw huts erected on Smith's farm used as a hospital after the battle of Antietam. 1862
